I’m thinking about trying several things in the following year. Apart from using Moodle still more and perhaps getting more of my colleagues hooked up to it I’d like to try some kind of classblogs. I’m still not sure if I do it from within Moodle or get some free blogs from Blogger et.al.

Moodle will offer a protected environment for my students. This should help to limit fears and get them to actually write something.
On the other hand, a blog on the internet definitely increases motivation – especially considering that strangers can post comments.

What to do?

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Over at Moodle News they are having a poll whether Moodle is web 2.0 or not.

Frankly speaking, I don’t care. Moodle is a fine LMS, period. I couldn’t care less if it is or isn’t web 2.0. It suits its purpose perfectly and that is what counts!

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You can pimp improve your Moodle with numerous plugins. The official Moodle website lists hundreds of them, ready for your or your pupils’ enjoyment. To give you a starting point, here are three shorter lists of the best or most used plugins:

• Best Moodle Modules & Plugins : Part 2
• What are the most sought Moodle Modules/Plug-ins?
• 5 Moodle Modules

Our Moodle uses the following plugins:

• Lightbox Gallery Resource (To give the students some eye candy. LMS don’t need to look boring!)
• Book
• Feedback (Very good for surveys and feedback.)

There you have it: Four lists of plugins. Now explore and enjoy!

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In case you are sick of all those clickable arrows you usually use to arrange your resources in Moodle, why don’t you enable drag’n'drop?

I simply wonder why this isn’t turned on by default. Or, to be more precise, why AJAX is turned on but deactivated for course editing by default.

(via Blended Learning practice at Wodonga TAFE)

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I just love this (old school) introduction to Moodle by Steve Williams (@MrHSIE):

(via Moodlenews)

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Let’s see:

• new hosting provider for our school-website: done!
• new domain name for our school-website: done!
• contents transferred from old to new site: done!
• installing Moodle on new sub domain: done!
• configuring the freshly installed Moodle to our preferred settings: done!

But: Why on earth does it take around a million clicks to setup Moodle with sane (for our school) settings? I wish there was an option where I could set these things during installation. Or maybe even something like: “Do you want to install full multimedia (+links to Youtube) support?” and/or “Is this Moodle for your institution/school only or for a broader audience (=guests allowed)?”

This would make it much quicker and less painless to set up a Moodle. With most school-Moodle-admins being teachers–who might not be computer science experts–security might benefit, too. I hope that Moodle 2.0 will offer significant advancement in this area.

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